Will Progress Kill Learning?

Nobel laureate Robert Laughlin says the Information Age is
anything but.

"When I teach and when I speak and when I relate to
people and when I write, I try to have humor in the right places."

So notes Robert B. Laughlin, winner of the 1998 Nobel
Prize in physics and author of a potent new book about the doors being
slammed on broad swaths of contemporary knowledge. In The Crime of
Reason and the Closing of the Scientific Mind, Laughlin explores the
implications of a variety of trends—in legislation, patents and
advertising—that restrict or even criminalize the use of knowledge. One
stark example: the work of a medical researcher being halted by fee
demands from the owner of a gene patent.

But what separates Crime of Reason from other
discussions of these issues is Laughlin's sometimes light and almost
impish style. Consider the way he warms up readers for an examination of
the "dangerous knowledge" a society will or won't embrace. In some cases,
he argues, people are innately programmed to seek out risk. "The obsession
with dangerous things keeps worsening," he observes drily, "until you get
to bungee jumping, hang gliding, and skiing way too fast, although
by that time it's not your problem anymore."

Laughlin, the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of
Physics, gravitated to the subject of restricted knowledge as he saw the
stakes being raised by the influence of the Internet, technology and
fast-advancing research in genetics. The "granddaddy" of all such
problems, says Laughlin, was the Atomic Energy Act of 1954, which he
summarizes in his book as imposing "sweeping restrictions on what you can
say about nuclear energy in public, including disclosing what knowledge is
classified." Control of the Internet—regularly at issue in legal battles
about music and video piracy - and debates over the ethics of cloning are
examples brimming with relevance and alarm in daily life.

"What I argue has happened," Laughlin says, "is there
was born in 1954 a fundamental conflict between the needs of our society
to be safe and to be economically prosperous on the one hand, and a human
right that you thought you had on the other, which is the right to better
yourself by learning - and, of course, there's no such civil right,
there's no such law."

Photo: L. A. Cicero

Laughlin makes his case throughout The Crime of
Reason by focusing on big-picture assertions and leaving much of the
justification to copious footnotes. As a result, the book maintains a
basic readability no matter how thick the topic—laws designed against
encryption systems, intellectual property rights and the economics of
spam, to name a few. Some assertions ("the Information Age should probably
be called the Age of Amnesia") have a counterintuitive bite that makes for
delicious debate.

Just wait until enough people read Laughlin's
suggestion that, in addition to the open announcements of cloned animals,
"It is very likely that we also got Hal (or Heather) the human. . . .
There was, however, no public announcement of a cloned human, presumably
because of the storm of public outrage that would have ensued."

Is he serious? "I cannot prove it," says Laughlin,
throwing in a charming smile while emphasizing that the speculation is
scientifically sound.

The Crime of Reason was released this fall in
the United States by Basic Books. It previously was published in Germany
by the Suhrkamp Verlag company, kicking off a series being planned in
collaboration with Stanford, whose faculty will write books for at least
initial release overseas.

As Laughlin plunged into appearances promoting The
Crime of Reason, he was finishing another manuscript - an account of
his tumultuous stint from mid-2004 to mid-2006 as president of the Korea
Advanced Institute of Science and Technology.

"It was one of those bizarre things that never happened before and
never will again," he says. "So it was an event in history, and I have
to tell about it."